Family Involvement in Schools

Reschly (n.d.) provided an excellent summary of the importance of family involvement in schools and RTI. This article can be found at: http://www.rtinetwork.org/essential/family/schools-familes-and-rti

Here are some of the main takeaways I took from this resource:

• Family involvement is clearly linked to a student’s outcomes in school and beyond
• When schools and families effectively collaborate, these outcomes are further improved (Henderson & Mapp, 2002)
• Research on this topic is difficult to conduct as it is hard to isolate parent involvement as a factor, but it is promising regardless
• The “Task Force on Empirically Supported Interventions in School Psychology, found moderate to large effect sizes across family intervention domains (i.e., parent education, parent involvement, family/parent consultation, family–school collaboration/partnerships, family systems therapy/family training, and early childhood family-focused interventions; Carlson & Christenson, 2005). Across these areas, certain intervention components stood out: those that stressed collaboration and dialogue between families and schools and joint monitoring of student progress; parent interventions that focused on specific, measurable outcomes; family involvement interventions that emphasized the role of parents as tutors in a defined subject area; and school–family consultation (Christenson & Carlson, 2005).”
  • This article consistently cites this Special Issue of School Psychology Quarterly,

    Volume 20, issue 4 (2005), which may be a valuable starting point in synthesizing research on this topic.

• In its ideal form, RTI allows parents and educators to collaborate from the start of any noticed difficulties and continue to build a positive relationship through the intervention process and beyond.
• Let’s problem solve together with parents!!